Cape Town - After what was a disastrous start to the Cape Town ePrix for Porsche, it couldn’t have been a more than perfect ending.
Championship leader Pascal Wehrlein crashed out in the first lap and Antonio Felix da Costa started the race in 11th place.
The outlook wasn’t looking good but the Portuguese driver managed to pull off a sensational win at the inaugural Cape Town ePrix .
.@afelixdacosta says he was happy to ‘pull the rabbit out of the hat’ in #CapeTownEPrix win pic.twitter.com/yuovvjxooj
— IOL Sport (@IOLsport) February 25, 2023
Da Costa says he is more than pleased with how his drive went.
“Starting 11th I knew our car has obviously been efficient, through the start of this season, so I know we can go forwards in races but it’s not an easy track to overtake. Obviously the race played out perfect for us with the second safety car with everyone having to save a little more energy, so that helped me.
I tried to save a little energy in the first 40% of the race and the race then came to us, everything just played out nice to what we wanted to do and some days it’s like this and it comes your way and I was happy to pull the rabbit out the hat when I had to and it feels good.“
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DS Penske’s Jean-Eric Vergne was second in the race building on his win back in the Hyderabad leg of the race.
The Frenchman says it was a tricky race.
“First of all it was a tough weekend, I started yesterday and I was a second and a half off the pace and this morning I was a second off the pace and I was really struggling on that track yesterday. You really need to be brave, and to be fair I was not brave in the practice session and I was just a but too slow. It was quite hard to pull myself together, I had a qualifying and in the race. I tried to be efficient as possible, it was going very well. I came back to the field.
I actually think Antonio miss is that attack mode is what actually what made him win the race because then he pulled behind me and we had a huge amount of energy saving to do after the second safety car, the slip stream is massive in that car and this is the moment where you could get more energy and put the attack on me and I think if he didn’t attack more I would have stayed behind him and save energy and then maybe be in the position to make that move.“
The Championship takes a break for the next two weeks before heading to Sao Paulo on the 24th of March.
@AliciaPillay56